ABSTRACT
The D-N or covering law model identified the law of nature as the source of science’s explanatory power. Counterexamples to this model from within science suggested that we need to analyze scientific explanations as answers to questions, instead of deductive arguments. Our interest is in scientific explanations, as opposed to other kinds of (non-scientific) explanations. What we want to know is what makes them scientific: to use a term introduced in Chapter 3, we seek the “relevance relation” between a question
that it will happen. Often these causal explanations rest on or even include non-strict laws that connect causes and effects that don’t always go together. These laws are non-strict because they contain ceteris paribus-other things being equal-clauses. Explanations that cite such laws, or such causes cannot satisfy the logical positivist requirement of giving good grounds to expect their explanandumevent to have occurred. This may not be a problem if we forego the demand that they do so.
